Comment on Sustainable network upgrade
Carunga@feddit.de 11 months agoWow, just had a very short look,this looks like an amazing rabbit hole to get into. Do you run this yourself. Did you find the setup difficult? Is the,WiFi range compareable to a comercial access point?
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The Banana Pi is easy to get going, simply download the image and flash on a SD card. We’re talking about a vendor that actively supports OpenWrt after all.
There are other devices supported by OpenWrt and this might interest you. Checkout the tables. There are also tons of Commercial routers / AP that are supported by OpenWrt and will provide a good experience but you’ve to pick them very carefully.
About range it mostly boils down to the WiFi chip manufacturer and if you want open software or not. It boils down to: the devices with the most range and speed are usually powered by Broadcom (Ubiquiti and whatnot) but you don’t have OpenWrt for those chips because they don’t provide open-source drives. MediaTek and Atheros are very open-source friendly and they perform well but Broadcom is Broadcom.
I’ve been running OpenWrt and DD-WRT (supports older routers some with Broadcom chips) for about a decade now and I don’t see me going back to bullshit vendors and their cloud stuff. I even deploy those on customers (usually small offices 10-50 people) and they’re happy with them as well. The Banana Pi BPI-R3 is my main router / AP and I’m very happy with it, more CPU and RAM than required for sure. I also deployed one at a customer and it runs flawlessly. Whenever the R4 is released I’ll deploy one to another customer who’s currently running a bit short as their current router is having trouble with more than 10 or 15 VPN clients connected at the same time.
Carunga@feddit.de 11 months ago
Wow. Nice hints. Never really heard about the banana pie routers. Great to hear from someone with extended knowledge! You gave lots to read and think about. Setting up a mesh network requires some work but seems doable. Have you used it? Does it work for you once setup smoothly? Sounds great all in all but not sure if I can motivate myself for the extra effort (and the negative feedback for breaking the internet). Do you use the metal cases from banana pie and their WiFi antennas or are there better options? It will be in the living room and a not to techy look is required.
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Mesh works if the hardware supports it, no problems there. I do use the metal cases and their antennas, they’re reliable and solid options.
As I said somewhere in this post the BPI-3 is overkill if you’re just looking for an AP, there are older older or newer commercial AP/routers that are cheaper that can also run OpenWrt. lemmy.world/comment/4971502